Jilly Cooper challenges the assumption that England nowadays is a classless society, and sets out to show how snobbery is alive and well and at home in the English mind. She chronicles the social attitudes and lifestyles of Harry Stow-Crat and his peers, Mr and Mrs Nouveau-Richards, and Jen Teale and her husband Bryan, and makes characteristically wry observations on the courtship behaviour, choice of furnishings, appetites and ambitions of the merry-tocracy, the telly-stocracy, and many other inhabitants of castle, Victorian terrace and council flat.